Fall 2016 Undergraduate English Courses: Twentieth Century

358:363 Violence and Creativity

Some writers argue that creativity is stifled by violence; some argue that creativity resists violence; some argue that violence spurs creativity, that creativity requires violence, or that violence is one of the forms that creativity can take.

This course explores the relationship between violence and creativity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and world anglophone fiction. We will also consider related themes such as the representation of war in the modernist and contemporary novel; the critique of euphemism and conventional morality; memory, trauma, and psychoanalysis; nationalism and language; imperialism, migration, and citizenship; the effects of film, television, and popular music on literary culture; and globalization and anti-globalization. Our readings are likely to include E.M. Forster's A Room with a View, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Pat Barker's Regeneration, and Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World; poems by Wilfred Owen; and short stories by James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.